Art Bulletin Schapiro in Silos

7/29/2019 Art Bulletin Schapiro in Silos

1/28

Meyer Schapiro in Silos: Pursuing an Iconography of StyleAuthor(s): John WilliamsSource: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 85, No. 3 (Sep., 2003), pp. 442-468Published by: College Art Association

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3177382 .Accessed: 19/06/2011 13:17

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless

you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you

may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at .http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=caa. .

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed

page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of

content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms

of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Art

Bulletin.
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=caahttp://www.jstor.org/stable/3177382?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=caahttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=caahttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/3177382?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=caa


2/28

Meyer Schapiro in Silos: Pursuing an Iconographyof StyleJohn Williams

The great interest of the Marxist approach lies not only inthe attempt to interpret historically changing relations ofart and economic life in the light of a general theory ofsociety but also in the weight given to the differencesandconflicts within the social group as motors of development,and to the effects of these on outlook, religion, morality,and philosophical ideas.-Meyer Schapiro, "Style" 1953)1

In 1939, some fourteen years before Meyer Schapiro thuscharacterized the Marxist approach to the history of art in hisfamous essay on style, he had himself provided a showpiece ofa Marxist approach in an article in this journal.2 "FromMozarabic to Romanesque in Silos" was devoted to the clois-ter sculpture and manuscript illumination of the Castilianmonastery of Santo Domingo de Silos. Schapiro arrayed a vastnumber of wide-ranging references to buttress an argumentlinking the art of the Castilian monastery of Silos to the socialand political complexion of the place. Schapiro's article wasimpressive not only for the radical nature of the argumentbut also for its energy and erudition, its style. It was long:sixty-two pages distributed about equally between main textand footnotes. Some of the 223 footnotes provided whatamounted to encyclopedic articles on such topics as demon-ology and Spanish economic history. Schapiro began by re-marking on the need to consider stylistic influence not assomething inevitable, but as possible only if social conditionsare right for reception. Silos provided a test case, for "In thegreat monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos, especially, wecan follow the emergence of the new style, because bothMozarabic and Romanesque styles were practiced in the ab-bey at the same moment.... and in the light of documents ofthe time, it is possible to see how new conditions in thechurch and the secular world led to new conceptions of thetraditional themes or suggested entirely new subjects."3 Fourdecades later one eminent scholar of the field hailed it as"the most profound piece of writing on Romanesque art byanyone to this day,"4and another concluded, "There are fewtexts on medieval sculpture and painting which could standup to the [article's] complexity of ideas and insights."5 An-other article published by Schapiro in 1939, on the sculptureof Souillac,6 where a comparable approach was employed,has been recently eulogized as a guide for today's art histo-rians.7

While many sites might have provided the chance "tointerpret historically changing relations of art and economiclife in the light of a general theory of society," Schapiro foundSilos unusual in that "at the end of the eleventh century wefind two distinct and in many ways, opposed styles in Silos....The practice of these two styles in the same monastery wasnot simply a matter of two stages of development carried byoverlapping generations."8 One style belonged to the copy ofthe Commentary on the Apocalypse by Beatus of Li6bana

written and decorated at Silos (Figs. 1, 12, 15, 20).9 The otherinformed the extraordinary collection of cloister sculpture,but more particularly the large plaques with New Testamentsubjects on its corner piers (Figs. 2, 21). The text of the richlyillustrated manuscript was completed by monks at Silos in1091, as we know from prolix colophons presented below. Itsillustrations were provided by another local monk in 1109 ina style called Mozarabic, that is, the style associated with theIslamicized culture of Mozarab Christians, those living underor culturally influenced by Muslims. The tenth century wit-nessed the heyday of this style. In contrast, the sculptureexhibited an up-to-date Romanesque style, which Schapirodated to the end of the eleventh century, thus contempora-neous with the illustration of the Beatus Commentary. Formost art historians of his day the presence of atypical styleswould have prompted a search for analogues elsewhere inorder to chart sources of influence. In Schapiro's article itinspired a search for a social explanation. The more abstract,hieratic, frozen, and outdated Mozarabic style of the manu-script was held by him to be expressive of a parochial monas-tic class dominated by fixed ecclesiastical rules.10 It had beendeliberately chosen to render homage to tradition and ex-press opposition to change. The more realistic Romanesquestyle of the sculpture, in contrast, was the product of "layartisanship of a high technical order."" Schapirojudged thestyle to be local, not imported, and linked to a new Castile ofgrowing trade, urbanization, and a nascent popular culturethat promoted secular values and challenged ecclesiasticaldomination.12

Schapiro offered his examination with the acknowledg-ment, "Amore comprehensive study might lead us to changethe conclusions; but it would have to follow the methodemployed here, the critical correlation of the forms andmeanings in the images with historical conditions of the sameperiod and region."13 This article is a reply to that challenge.Schapiro's socially grounded solution to the conundrum ofdifferent contemporaneous styles at Silos is written with suchclarity and energy that it obscures the fact that it depends onpropositions that are untenable. It is inevitable that subse-quent revisions in the scholarship dealing with historicalconditions around 1100 C.E.permit a more comprehensiveunderstanding. These conditions involve not only the state ofCastilian society, especially at Silos, but also the historicalconditions of artistic patronage and production, features thatSchapiro scanted in his focus on style. It is possible, withdistance, to evaluate Schapiro's handling of the evidence.What follows is an attempt to apprehend the origin of hisreorientation as a formalist, as well as an understanding ofthe limited nature of Schapiro's success, through a "criticalcorrelation of the forms and meanings in the images withhistorical conditions of the same period and region." Theprocess will entail a look at his formation and evolution as an


3/28

MEYER SCHAPIRO IN SILOS 443

1 ChristAppearing n the Clouds,from Beatusof Liebana,In Apocalipsin,Silos,1109. London,BritishLibraryMSAdd. 11695, fol. 21r (photo: bypermissionof The BritishLibrary)art historian and a critique of his approachto the extraordi-narysculpture and painting produced at Silos about 1100.14Schapiro the FormalistSchapirostepped onto the art historical stage as a formalist,an orientation consistent not only with the state of the disci-pline but also with his own training and considerable talentsas an artist with an abiding interest in the art of his time.l5For some reason, Schapiro himself did not in later life ac-knowledge the exclusively formalist nature of his disserta-tionl6 and its publication in a two-part article in the ArtBulletin,l7his earliestscholarship. In an interviewwith DavidCravenin the l990s he recalled that already in the 1920s,

when he wasfinishing his dissertationat Columbia Universityon the sculpture of Moissac, he practiced a social art history:D[avid] C[raven]:What of your famous article on SantoDomingo de Silos?Did it mark afundamentalshift in yourapproach to analyzing art? Was it influenced by Sovietthought, specificallyby Mikhail Lifshitz's 1938 interpreta-tion of Marxismand art?M[eyer] S[chapiro]: I have never read the book by Lif-shitz, nor am I interested in doing so. The conceptualframeworkfor my 1939 Silos article was first used in my1929 dissertation on Moissac.The third part of this disser-


4/28

444 AR-T Br'I.I.E[IN SEPITEMBER 2 003 VOI.LUME I.XXXV NUIBER 3

2 Santo Domingo de Silos, cloister,Doubting Thomas (Photo: InstitutAmatller)

tation, which has never been published, uses a Marxistconcept of history. Originally, after the first part of thedissertation appeared in the 1931 ArtBulletin, I planned torevise the second part on iconography and then to publishthe third part on the historical context for Moissac. Forvarious reasons I never found the time to complete therevision of the second part, so the last two parts have neverappeared in print.... In 1927 I was a guest of the monksat Santo Domingo de Silos. Much of my article was con-ceived then and it was written long before it was publishedin 1939.18

Schapiro's recollection of the dissertation is difficult tosquare with the copy deposited in the Columbia Universitylibrary. Indeed, Schapiro's characterizations of the articlesand the dissertation sowed the seeds of a continuing confu-sion. According to the first footnote in "The RomanesqueSculpture of Moissac," the two-part article published in theArt Bulletin in 1931, the dissertation on which it was based hadbeen accepted by the faculty of Columbia in May 1929,whereas the bibliographic record at the Avery Library atColumbia assigns it a date of 1935 for deposit. This is of littlepractical consequence, for footnote and figure numbers are


5/28


penned in, as are editorial corrections, and indicate that thisis the original text, and the citations indeed point to a date of1929.19 However, Schapiro's assertion that it was divided intothree parts is contradicted by the actual format. It is dividedinto two parts. In the first, 172 pages long, the capitals andtympanum are described in minute detail. It also includessome thirty pages (27-58) of a survey of iconographic paral-lels for the subjects. Part 2, 175-401, searches for the originsof forms and iconographic, stylistic, and ornamental paral-lels. The pier reliefs are included here. It is traditional arthistory. Nothing in it can be construed as taking a "Marxist"direction.

The confusion over a third part seems to stem from theoriginal conception of the article on Moissac. It opens withthe statement, "The study here undertaken consists of threeparts. In the first is described the style of the sculptures; inthe second the iconography is analyzed and its details com-pared with other examples of the same themes; in the thirdI have investigated the history of the style and tried to throwfurther light on its origins and development." However, theanticipated third part was never published. The two-partarticle in the Art Bulletin is based on part 1 of the dissertation,but with his discussion of the pier reliefs from part 2 of thedissertation also included. Thirty pages of part 1 on theiconography of the capitals were omitted. With the exceptionof the introductory pages, the texts of the article and disser-tation are essentially identical, although tightened in thejournal. Presumably, the anticipated third part of the articlewas to present part 2 of the dissertation. In later citations ofthe dissertation it is common to find references to an unpub-lished third part.20

Although the unpublished part 2 of the dissertation wassubtitled "Historical Study of the Cloister and the Tympa-num," it dealt solely, and in a traditional way, with the stylisticsources of the sculpture of Moissac. Schapiro had alerted thereader on the first page of the dissertation, "The presence inMoissac of so many works carved within one generation, andmanifesting such variety of style, permits inquiry into thenature of historical change in the light of observable materialdocuments." This might imply, at least with the benefit ofhindsight, that his interest in the sculpture of Moissac in-cluded an explanation of why different styles coexisted andan intention to answer it through a review of historical con-ditions. In fact, the "material documents" intended to castlight on changes of style consist exclusively of examples ofparticular styles. His formalist orientation is evident in theway he approached the differences in essentially contempo-raneous styles at Moissac. Having observed that the "earliestsculptures are flatter and more uniform in their surfaces," heproceeded to deal with them as examples of "primitive"art inthe way that Emmanuel L6wy conceived the term in hisRendering of Nature in GreekArt.21Schapiro went on to note,"In the later works the figures are more plastic and includevaried planes.... The whole is more intricate and involvedand more intensely expressive."22 Thus, part 2 presents theresults of a traditional use of style in a search for the formulasfound at Moissac. There is no hint that social or ideologicalcauses lay behind the stylistic changes. Indeed, in the disser-tation Schapiro criticized Wilhelm V6ge for invoking broadcultural movements to explain the emergence of Ro-

manesque sculpture in Languedoc.23 This is precisely whatSchapiro would attempt in "From Mozarabic to Romanesquein Silos." Schapiro's statement on the first page (175) of part2 of the dissertation is an accurate one: "In the followingchapters we will inquire into the pre-Romanesque arts of theregion and seek to determine the parts played by the varioustraditions which contributed to the formation of the Moissacstyles." The inquiry is chiefly focused on demonstrating thatAquitaine provided the artistic context that allowed Moissacto be carried out. His formalist orientation was revealed in hisintroduction to the dissertation:

No one has seriously studied the technique, materials,proportions, gestures, costumes, and expression of FrenchRomanesque art; and that more interesting subject of puredesign:-the processes of abstraction of natural and con-ventional forms in primitive arts, the drapery rhythms, andlinear schemata, the representation of space, movement,and the volume of objects, in this region of southernFrance,-still lacks its first treatise. Past discussion hasbeen of the iconography, chronology, and genealogy ofmonuments. ...

But even with the meager documents and this igno-rance of so many important factors, much can be learnedfrom the sculptures, if only they be submitted to a scru-pulous study. If we multiply observations, we increase ourmeans of controlling theories. Much that may seemminute or too finely drawn will appear general and indis-pensable, once we have seen its bearing.24

"Scrupulous study" involved minutely nuanced reading offormal character. This constitutes the substance and, in thedegree of its refinement, novelty of Schapiro's work on Mois-sac. Indeed, formal qualities were subjected by Schapiro tosuch unprecedented scrutiny that some communicative func-tion of style was implied. In his 1953 essay on the topic ofstyle, Schapiro represented it as "a vehicle within the group,communicating and fixing certain values of religious, socialand moral life through the emotional suggestiveness offorms."25 Verbalization of a content communicated by "emo-tional suggestiveness" must necessarily remain vague.But if the statement in the dissertation quoted above seemsto validate highly detailed description as a means to a largerend, vaguely expressed as "controlling theories," that end isnot taken up. In concluding with the statement, "Much thatmay seem minute or too finely drawn will appear general andindispensable, once we have seen its bearing," Schapiroseems to acknowledge a potential perception of disparitybetween effort and result.

Beyond Formalist Art HistoryIf it is impossible to reconcile Schapiro's recollection of hisdissertation of 1929 as already informed by a "Marxist con-cept of history" with its actual text, it may be because hisconversion to a different kind of art history was occurringeven as he completed his dissertation and readied it forpublication in 1931 in the Art Bulletin. In a review publishedthe next year ofJurgis Baltrusaitis's study of artistic schematain Romanesque art, Schapiro reprimanded the author for


6/28

446 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2003 VOLUME LXXXV NUMBER 3

analyzing formal schemata without engaging the issue of"meaning":

A crucial weakness of Baltrusaitis's dialectic lies in theinactive, neutral role of content in the formation of thework of art; it allows for no interaction between the mean-ings and shapes; the schemas remain primary and perma-nent. It is therefore an artificial or schematic dialecticwhich ignores the meanings of the works, the purpose ofthe art in Romanesque society and religion, expressiveaspects of the forms and meanings.... 26

The rejection of an exclusively formalist orientation im-plied in the criticism of Baltrusaitis's book coincided in timewith Schapiro's immersion in the political ferment of NewYork in the years of the Great Depression. Karl Werckmeisterwas surely right to conclude that the study of Silos was in-formed by the kind of concern for the relationship betweensocial status and art promoted by Schapiro's engagementwith the political and social issues of the 1930s.27 This en-gagement was heavy. In the same year in which his review ofBaltrusaitis appeared, Schapiro published four articles in theNew Masses, a literary magazine affiliated with the CommunistParty. Its editor, Whittaker Chambers, was Schapiro's closefriend. The two had traveled in Europe together in 1923, thepoint at which Chambers had become radicalized.28 Schapirowas also recruited to write essays on art for a "MarxistStudy ofAmerican Culture" that Harcourt Brace had agreed to pub-lish, a project involving among others Lionel Trilling, SidneyHook, Granville Hicks, and John Dos Passos (the project didnot materialize).29 Schapiro's aversion to traditional art his-tory and his resolve to abandon it for one that was Marxist inits ideals was forthrightly articulated in a letter to a friend in1936:

Bourgeois art-study, as a profession, is usually servile, pre-cious, pessimistic, and in its larger views of history, humannature and contemporary life, thoroughly reactionary. Wedo not overcome these things by abandoning the study ofart, but by giving it a Marxist direction.... I must addfinally, that a Marxist history of art, which yet remains tobe built, does not give up the techniques of research intodetails and fact developed during the last 100 years-onthe contrary, it insists upon scientific method throughout;but it rejects as unscientific the typical theories of W6lfflinand Dvorak (the best of the modern historians) for scien-tific reasons which must be obvious to you.30

The nature of the reorientation was reflected in three shortessays, "The Social Bases of Art,"31 "Race, Nationality andArt,"32and "The Public Use of Art."33Its Marxist inspirationis reflected in the journals he selected: between 1932 and1939 he wrote sixteen articles for the New Masses, the Nation,the Marxist Quarterly,Art Front, the Partisan Review, and thePapers of the First AmericanArtists' Congress.34n most of theseessays Schapiro addressed the issue of what kind of art ad-vanced the revolution. Style as such was not often introducedexcept as implied by statements such as "The good revolu-tionary picture ... should have the legibility and pointednessof a cartoon."35 But in his address to the American Artists'Congress in 1936 Schapiro took the relationship between

style and culture as his theme.36 An article he published inthe Marxist Quarterly he following year, "The Nature of Ab-stract Art," tied modern styles, Impressionist and others, tothe peculiar character of late-nineteenth-century society. Im-pressionism, for example, was seen to mirror the style of lifeof those members of society who appreciated it and were itspatrons:

The very existence of Impressionism which transformednature into a private, unformalized field for sensitive vi-sion, shifting with the spectator, made painting an idealdomain of freedom.... These urban idylls ... presupposethe cultivation of these pleasures as the highest field offreedom for an enlightened bourgeois detached from theofficial beliefs of his class . . . the cultivated rentier.37Actually, it was another New Yorker who, in that same year,made the most explicit claim that a Marxist approach ex-plained style as a result of social context. Milton Brown,Schapiro's junior by seven years, was a student at New YorkUniversity's Institute of Fine Arts in the 1930s when Schapirotaught classes and was available for consultation.38 His mas-ter's thesis dealt with French patronage of modern art froma distinct Marxist perspective.39 In an article entitled "TheMarxist Approach to Art," Brown argued:

While most critics will go so far as to concede the fact thatcontent in art is the formal equivalent of a social andcultural milieu, or even that it is a class expression ... theywill not agree with the Marxist that form or style is alsoexplainable by virtue of these same social conditions. This,of course, is the crucial point in all Marxist discussions ofculture.40

While Brown's exposure to Marxist ideology in his own familycomplicates any assumption that his Marxist approach merelyreflected Schapiro's, Brown later recalled, "All of us built onhis [Schapiro's] lectures; everybody who's around now gothis or her ideas from Meyer.... The things he said in class inthe early '30s have become common parlance."41Brown's context was French society of the early modernera. In "The Nature of Abstract Art" Schapiro not only linkedmodern styles to a particular, bourgeois, class but also pushedback the artistic revolution that rooted art in everyday expe-rience to the Renaissance:

As this same burgher class, emerging from a Christianfeudal order, began to assert the priority of sensual andnatural to ascetic and supernatural gods, and idealized thehuman body as the real locus of values... so the artistsderived from this valuation of the human being artisticideals of energy and massiveness of form which they em-bodied in robust, active or potentially active, human fig-ures.4This picture of the cultural change we associate with theadvent of the Renaissance was not, of course, original. Scha-piro's radical innovation in "From Mozarabic to Romanesquein Silos" was to relocate the revolutionary change to theperiod that competed with modern art for his attention,namely, the beginnings of Romanesque art about 1100. His


7/28


claim in "From Mozarabic to Romanesque at Silos" that thefigures in the cloister of Silos are conceived in a "far morenaturalistic way" and employ an "accented energy of move-ment"43 echoes the description, just quoted, of the new di-rection claimed for Renaissance art. The same dynamic was atwork, that is, the secularization and liberalization of a cultureonce dominated by the Church. Schapiro identified secular-ization with an independent, burgher class. The relocation ofthis watershed to the Romanesque period was problematic,especially so, as we shall see, for Silos.Schapiro and SilosSchapiro's visit to Silos in 1927 was made possible by aCarnegie Corporation grant for dissertation research onMoissac.44 This excursion to the Spanish site, still remem-bered at Silos when I visited in 1964, was indirectly owed toArthur Kingsley Porter (1883-1933), America's senior medi-evalist, whose primary interest was Romanesque art. Throughhis position at Harvard University and his publications, Por-ter helped make the art of the Middle Ages a topic as worthyof study as that of the Renaissance. That the social views ofSchapiro and Porter were as radically divergent as their back-grounds is apparent, as Thomas Crow has recently under-scored with a telling contrast of the two scholars' use of theTheophilus legend.45 Porter's desire to rid the world of ab-stract art and his antiurban recipe for immunizing the artistagainst commercialism, materialism, and cosmopolitanismcould scarcely be more opposed to Schapiro's implicit beliefin the cosmopolitan city as the wellspring of significant, thatis, abstract, modern art.46 This did not affect their personalrelations, however. In a letter to Schapiro in 1928, Porterexpressed regret that Schapiro was not coming to Harvard tostudy with him. Two years later Porter invited Schapiro tocollaborate on a handbook of Romanesque sculpture.47 Scha-piro declined. As we have seen, collaboration with Porter atthe dissertation stage of Schapiro's career would not haveinvolved reconciling incompatible methods, for the text com-pleted in 1929 might well have been written by a student ofPorter's.

Porter had put Silos on the art historical map when heconverted its cloister sculpture into a weapon with which toassault French archaeological theory, that is, the tendency ofFrench scholars to identify the birthplace of Romanesquewith France. He declared in his RomanesqueSculptureof thePilgrimage Roads that "the earliest extant monument of pil-grimage art is really the cloister of Santo Domingo de Silos."48In his contribution in 1924 to a collection of articles pub-lished in Germany on the state of the discipline, Porter hadmade his dark opinion of French scholarship unmistakablyclear.49 Schapiro's dismissive reviews of French scholarshipsuggests that he shared Porter's antipathy, but he did not useSilos as a weapon in the "Spain-versus-France war" ignited byPorter. Indeed, although he accepted in his dissertation Por-ter's precocious date of about 1075 for the sculpture of thecloister at Silos, he rejected Porter's claim that Silos hadinfluenced Moissac and claimed the reverse, arguing inge-niously if unconvincingly that Silos and other Spanish worksputatively from the middle of the eleventh century displayedsigns of influence from French buildings now lost. Thesehypothetical monuments would have provided the founda-

tion for the style of Moissac.50 By the time he wrote "FromMozarabic to Romanesque in Silos" Schapiro had moved to adate of about 1100 for Silos, as had Porter himself.5 Not onlywas this position more reasonable, it was also necessary for athesis that required a chronological pairing of the sculptureof the Silos cloister with the painting of the Beatus Commen-tary there early in the twelfth century. Of greater importanceto Schapiro than the direction influences traveled was thefact that their reception depended on comparable stages ofeconomic development. Instead of indicating inferior status,influences demonstrated a parity in social evolution: "If agreat mass of evidence confirms the connections betweenSpanish centers and the foreign centers and the foreignsources of the new style, little has been said of the localconditions which made this new art appropriate and evennecessary. ...52

Schapiro made an increasingly prosperous and secularizedSpain crucial to a Marxist explanation for the different stylesat Silos; the space devoted to economic history reflected thatfact and contributed greatly to the novelty of his article. As hestated at the outset, "in the light of documents of the time, itis possible to see how new conditions in the church and thesecular world led to new conceptions of the traditionalthemes or suggested entirely new subjects."53 Further on heasserted, "The beginnings of an aggressive middle class datefrom this moment. Modern municipal institutions, vernacu-lar literature, and a high secular culture arise at the sametime."54The site of Silos itself experienced this change. Spainaround 1100, he declared, was not the "primitive, medieval,and conquered" Spain that had produced the Mozarabicstyle.

Schapiro linked the up-to-date Romanesque style displayedby the cloister sculpture to this social evolution whereby theChurch began to yield control to secular classes and institu-tions. It fostered a style more reflective of human experience.In his dissertation, Schapiro had seen the evolution from a"primitive" style of the Apostle reliefs of the cloister at Mois-sac to a more naturalistic one in the reliefs of the porch as afunction of technical perfection operating over the threedecades the campaign had consumed.55 Although in "FromMozarabic to Romanesque in Silos" he retained a belief thatthe order of execution was a determinant of naturalism-he

judged the Doubting Thomas relief to be later than those ofthe Ascension and the Pentecost-the more significant cor-relation for naturalism was the status of the carvers as repre-sentatives of an emerging urbanized and freer world:The expansion of the upper classes, . . . the formation of astronger, centralized monarchical and ecclesiastical au-thority, in fact intensified the development of merchantand artisan groups.... Thus the new practical and cul-tural needs of the upper classes indirectly advanced thegrowth of the towns and those interests in everyday expe-rience and the norms of empirical knowledge which un-derlie the broad naturalistic tendencies of later medievalart.... The large Romanesque reliefs are conceived in afar more naturalistic way than any Mozarabic representa-tions. The very idea of monumental narrative sculptureimplies already-beside the advance in techniques ofworking stone-a degree of concreteness and verity op-


8/28


3 Santo Domingo de Silos, cloister capital (photo: InstitutAmatller)

posed to the emblematic illumination and the inert, mi-nuscule ivory carving which were the chief fields of imag-ery in the preceding period. The sculptures of Silosabound in marvelously precise and refined details of hu-man form and costume.56

A corollary to this conclusion was Schapiro's perceptionthat the growing secularization first revealed itself stylisticallyat the farthest remove from the main, religiously focused,subjects. The capitals with animals and foliage, for example(Fig. 3), "offer an even freer secular field of artisanshipindependent of the doctrine of the church."57 But evenwithin religious imagery, the margins offered room for en-tirely secular excurses. In this attention to the margin, Scha-piro was founding father of a special topos within modern arthistory.58 The identification of marginal and secular wouldremain for some time a component in his analysis of art. In1944, for example, he assigned a nonbiblical, secular identityto the figure of an archer on the Ruthwell Cross and deemedit marginal despite its prominent position at the top of theshaft.59 The marginal location of the secular response to anevolving feudal world was central to his 1947 essay on themedieval aesthetic:

By the eleventh and twelfth centuries there had emergedin western Europe within church art a new sphere ofartistic creation without religious content and imbuedwith values of spontaneity, individual fantasy, delight incolor and movement, and the expression of feeling thatanticipate modern art. This new art, on the margins of thereligious work, was accompanied by a conscious taste ofthe spectators for the beauty of workmanship, materialand artistic devices, apart from the religious meanings.60

Perhaps the outstanding instance in which Schapiro attachedprimary importance to a marginal figure can be found in hisstudy of the Merode Altarpiece, where Joseph, in the wing ofa triptych whose central panel is occupied by the Virgin Mary,is made to dominate the message.61 Far from contributing to

a secularization of meaning, however, Joseph and the panelare exploited as means of enhancing religious meaning.In "From Mozarabic to Romanesque in Silos" the marginalimagery of the Beatus Commentary, especially the jongleurs(Fig. 4), the Hell page (Fig. 20), and the cityscape andmusicians atop the Doubting Thomas relief (Fig. 2) receivedhis most searching examinations, not only of style but also ofcontent. In his analysis of the Doubting Thomas, Schapiroprovided the first indication of the kind of deeply groundediconographic analyses that would mark his future art histor-ical essays. They went beyond the standard recapitulationof the history of a given subject in order to focus on choiceof subject and manner of rendering as signifiers of a partic-ular cultural environment.62 At this stage Schapiro saw thatenvironment as large and sought to find in it reflections ofsocial strata. The relief of the Doubting Thomas exposedmost openly for him the incipient secularist culture of Silos.Its subject, he said, "embodies the antitheses of faith andexperience."63 It was paradigmatic, in that he saw there the"richest evidence of the interaction of Romanesque andMozarabic design" so that "the interplay [of faith and expe-rience] appears in the subject of the work as well as in theforms."64

Moreover, the subject combined, for him, telling para-doxes: the Church had called into being a tangible imagewhose "chief meaning is that the eyes and the hands are notto be trusted" and prominently features Saint Paul, who wasnot an actual witness to the events of the Passion and itsaftermath.65 Schapiro, whose identification of religion as ananti-individualist counterforce was a constant, saw Thomas asthe embodiment of skepticism.66 In fact, as Karl Werckmei-ster has demonstrated, Schapiro's claim of antithetical rolesfor Paul and Thomas was invalid in the Church's view.67

The particular attention paid by Schapiro to the walls atopthe Thomas relief is consonant with the central role theurban setting played in Schapiro's reconstruction of the cre-ative forces of the medieval period: "The urban development,the social relationships arising from the new strength of themerchants and artisans as a class, suggested new themes andoutlooks to religious thought and thereby helped to trans-form religious art."68Michael Camille provided a beautifulevocation of Schapiro's merging of the medieval and the cityin which he lived.69 Schapiro's identification with the city maybe seen in the scorn he heaped on Frank Lloyd Wright'sutopian vision precisely because it was essentially agrarian.70We can also sense the special links to the artistic world of NewYork that we know he had. In reading the sensitive andlengthy passages on compositions in the Silos Beatus, one isstruck by their resemblance to the kind of intensive formalscrutiny needed to access the avant-garde easel paintings ofhis time. In those abstract, nonanecdotal paintings, meaninghad to be decoded-more likely, encoded-from form alone.Schapiro himself invoked modern painting in his interpreta-tion of the musicians at the city wall of the Doubting Thomasrelief: "[they are] jongleurs, who improvise a sensual music,in contrast to the set liturgical music of the church-thesculptor expresses also the self-consciousness of an indepen-dent artistic virtuosity. He inserts figures of lay artists ... justas in modern art, which is wholly secular, painters so oftenrepresent figures from the studio or from an analogous world


9/28


of entertainment... .71 Actually, the cityscape and musiciansenhance religious content by incorporating exegetical tradi-tion. As Werckmeister pointed out, the Doubting Thomasepisode normally was placed in Jerusalem, more precisely, inSolomon's court atop the Temple Mount, andJerusalem wassometimes represented with inhabited walls.72 Serafin Mo-ralejo pointed to an exegetical tradition whereby the episodewas associated with Exodus. The cymbal-playing woman atopthe wall may be an allusion to Miriam.73

Schapiro identified the jongleursin the Beatus Commentary(Fig. 4) as another major eruption of secular imagery withinan otherwise religious setting.74 In a configuration recallingthe use of figures to form initials in Romanesque manu-scripts, one extravagantly dressed man plays a rebec as an-other dances in front of him, wielding a knife and holding apeacock. Yet as he claimed for them a secular identity, Scha-piro cited and reproduced comparable musical figures inmusical manuscripts of liturgical function. Moreover, he as-sumed, logically, that the Silos pair was inspired by the Apoc-alyptic passage whose illustration appears on the verso of thispage, where the Lamb is celebrated by the musical Elders.Even so, his faith in the new urban and lay culture he hadreconstructed for Silos led him to declare that this religiousmeaning has been eclipsed: the jongleurs of the Beatus Com-mentary "dance and play, not for God, but for the people oran earthly court; they belong to the fairs and the world ofsecular pleasure. .. ."75It is a conclusion called into questionby Schapiro's own citation and reproduction of comparableillustrations in liturgical manuscripts, as well as by performersin a celebration for the Veneranda Dies, a sermon purport-edly composed by Pope Calixtus II around the time the SilosBeatus was illustrated, held in the cathedral of Santiago deCompostela. In it the important feast of the translation of thebody of SaintJames to Spain includes this scene of worship-ers: "Whatjoy and admiration to look on the pilgrims stand-ing at the foot of the venerable altar of St.James in perpetualvigilance.... Each one with his compatriots individually ful-fill with mastery the watches. Some play zithers, others lyres,others drums, others flutes, others flageolets, trumpets,harps, violins, . . .others singing with zithers, others singingaccompanied by various instruments, pass the night invigil."76 By any measure, Santiago de Compostela far out-ranked Silos as an urban center fostering commercial andartisanal life. It is difficult to imagine that a scenario designedby some cleric to glorify the cult of SaintJames employed atheme that would undermine its integrity. The same is truefor the jongleursof the Silos Beatus, which was designed by amonk for an audience of monks.

With the necessity of attributing the style of the cloistersculpture at Silos to the socially progressive character of theimmediate environs of Silos, Schapiro abandoned withoutargument his original conviction, noted in his dissertation,that the workshop responsible was foreign.77 It is true that aconsensus on the sources and dates of the sculpture remainselusive, but no study has proposed a local origin. Althoughthey are tentative, the only parallels that have been advancedfor the sculpture of Silos are Languedocian, specifically, thecloister of Moissac and the cloister capitals of St-Sernin deToulouse.78 Schapiro did not specifically address the issue oflocal versus foreign, but when he stated that "we shall find in

4 Jongleurs, rom Beatus, In Apocalipsin,Silos, 1109, MSAdd.11695, fol. 86r (photo: by permission of The British Library)

the Romanesque sculptures qualities and details that recallthe local Mozarabic art," he ruled out an exotic origin.79Schapiro's conclusion was based on certain compositionalsimilarities shared with Mozarabic miniatures such as thepainting ChristAppearingin the Clouds of the Silos Beatus (Fig.1). In the "groups of uniform Apostles like the Ascension, thePentecost and the Doubting Thomas [Fig. 2]," he detected a"regular repetition of the unit figure and the impersonality ofthe human elements, [which] suggest Mozarabic as much asRomanesque art."80 It is difficult to credit any claim fordetails of a Mozarabic sort in the sculpture.81 The claim callsfor conditions and procedures that Schapiro did not discuss.There was, for example, no tradition of Mozarabic figuresculpture to survive or be revived, so the stiffness and repe-tition he perceives have no obvious links to a specificallylocal, Mozarabic sculptural style.82 If any survival of Mozara-bic sculptural style is to be expected, it would logically involvethe cloister capitals, since capitals are the major componentby far in the corpus of Mozarabic sculpture (Fig. 5). Residuesof the strong Mozarabic tradition in capital and ornamentalsculpture might be anticipated if they were executed by localcarvers, but the Silos cloister capitals exhibit none (Fig. 3).However, without argument, Schapiro posits such a localMozarabic sculptural tradition: "If Mozarabic design is still aformative element in the Romanesque sculptures, it is furtherevidence that these are native works and depend on therecent historical change."83 But stiffness and repetition arenot properties exclusive to Mozarabic art. Moreover, thelarge reliefs really have no counterpart at this date, a fact thatdoes not enter into Schapiro's discussion. In his statementthat "in Romanesque such groups [as the Ascension, Pente-cost, Last Judgment, and so on] are generally disposed in asingle row in one plane,"84 he must have had tympana inmind, for the narratives within pier plaques, with their exag-gerated vertical format, had no parallels. In the pier reliefs atMoissac the same setting encloses single standing Apostles.


10/28


5 San Miguel de Escalada, porch capital (photo: InstitutAmatller)

The challenge such a format posed when all of the Apostlesmust be represented within the same vertical field must havecontributed to the regimented composition employed.No section of his article reveals the radical extent to whichSchapiro was willing to offer style as a prism for reading socialcontext as that involving the perception of Mozarabic tracesin the relief sculpture of the cloister at Silos. He found theamalgam there of Romanesque and Mozarabic a perfect re-flection of a transitional culture:

The strengthening of the church as a secular power dur-ing the Reconquest required also a rigorously supervisedrenewal of cult and the restoration of old monastic rules.And since the church was the main support of the monu-mental arts, the newer values emerging in society could beexpressed in these arts only in a form qualified by thespecial interests of the church. The Romanesque forms ofchurch art embody naturalistic modes of seeing (and val-ues of the new aristocracy) within the framework of thechurch's traditional spiritualistic views and symbolic pre-sentation. The persistence of Mozarabic qualities in theearly Romanesque art of Silos may be seen then not onlyas incidental to a recent cultural transition, but as a posi-tive aspect of the expansive development of the church.85

This explanation for why the reliefs, in his view, do notappear fully Romanesque asks art to reflect in such an ex-traordinarily sensitive way the complexions of a transitionalsociety that it strains his general argument. Finding Mozara-bic qualities underscores his unremitting, all or nothing com-mitment to an equation of status and style. The negativepressure it puts on the thesis is evident. While it is impossibleto ignore the presence of some figures in a Romanesque stylein the Beatus Commentary (Figs. 4, 12, 20), the recognitionof Mozarabic qualities in the sculpture is highly problematic.

Silos as an Urbanized Pilgrimage CenterFor the sake of his argument that the modern sculptural styledepended on the kind of economic evolution associated withthe beginnings of urbanization, Schapiro sought to persuadethe reader that Silos was a prosperous, urbanized site. Hepresented it as

one of the leading monasteries in Castile . . . constantlyinvolved in the schemes of the energetic Castilian rulers toextend their power.... Silos enjoyed several large dona-tions of the victorious kings.... In the documents of thetime Domingo appears frequently as the councilor of thekings of Castile and as an agent in their political andecclesiastical affairs.86

Moreover, Silos "was one of the wealthiest abbeys in Spainand received great donations in the eleventh century."87Thesuperior economic and political status he assumed for Silosand its region was based not so much on his independentevaluation of the evidence but, rather, on the portrait of thesite recently provided by highly respected medievalists inSpain, Castilians for the most part. For his history of Castilehe drew on the three-volume account written by LucianoSerrano, abbot of Silos at the time of his visit.88 The heroiza-tion of Castile was especially orchestrated by Ram6n Menen-dez Pidal, whose erudite study of the poem of the Cid hadappeared in two volumes a decade before "From Mozarabicto Romanesque in Silos." With its richly contextual nature, itmight have served as a model for Schapiro's study of Silos.89The Silos monk Justo Perez de Urbel, whose two-volumestudy of Spanish monasticism appeared just after Schapiro'svisit to Silos, was also an important partisan of this promo-tion.90 In a book of the same year, Perez de Urbel followedhis argument that the cloister must have been a product ofthe abbacy of Domingo (d. 1073) with these words:

The appearance of the cloister of Silos coincided with theheroic age of Castile. The drive of the pilgrimage to San-tiago brought endless waves of foreigners to the roads ofnorthern Spain. The Reconquest would cover the arms ofCastile with glory and the Castilian chests with gold. TheCid conquered Valencia and the dream of a Spain free ofthe Moors began to be realized.91In fact, the assumption of prosperity is not borne out by thecharters of Silos. It is true that in the eleventh century andinto the twelfth, Silos, with San Pedro de Cardena, San Pedro

de Arlanza, and San Salvador de Ofia, was one of the quartetof important Castilian monasteries. Their abbots sometimesaccompanied the monarchs, attended important events, suchas Fernando I's dedication of his palatine church of SanIsidoro, and witnessed important charters. However, thecharters affecting Silos during the eleventh-century periodsuggest that it ranked fourth of these Castilian monasteries:the signature of Abbot Domingo of Silos appears less fre-quently and almost always after those of the abbots of Car-defia, Arlanza, and Ona.92 Nor is the evidence for wealthbefore the end of the eleventh century convincing. Recordsof the first half of the century yield only seven modest gifts ofproperty from individuals.93 In the Life of Domingo writtenby the Silensian monk Grimaldus about 1100, much is made


11/28


of the role of Ferando I of Le6n in recognizing and pro-moting Abbot Domingo of Silos, but outside of Domingo'spresence in the capital in 1063 at the dedication of thepalatine basilica of San Isidoro,94 no further evidence ofcontact between the king and Domingo or signs of friendshipand esteem have been noted. Cardefia, instrumental in mov-ing the Castilian see of Oca to Burgos; Ona, the Castilianpantheon; and San Pedro de Arlanza, where Fernando orig-inally intended his tomb, were obviously important. Arlanzareceived from Fernando and Queen Sancha in 1041 themonastery of Tabladillo with all its possessions.95 The firstroyal gift to Silos came from Fernando's son, Sancho II, in1067, when he gave it the monastery of Mamblas.96 However,as Mamblas was deserted at the time, no source of incomecame with it. A modern study of the dominion of Silosreached the conclusion that the general claim of prosperityunder Abbot Domingo was not justified.97 Only under Al-fonso VII (r. 1127-57) did the site come into its own as atarget of royal largesse. It received more donations (thirty-seven) from that ruler alone than from all his predecessorscombined (twenty-seven). Not before 1135 can it be said withcertainty that a Leonese ruler visited the site, when AlfonsoVII confirmed there a prior gift of his mother, Urraca.98

According to Schapiro, the preconditions for the receptionof Romanesque were an economic evolution from an essen-tially agrarian stage to an urbanizing one and the kind ofmoney economy associated with trade. On the strength of thehistory of the abbey written by Silos's eminent archivistMarius Ferotin, he proposed that a town could be found atSilos by the middle of the eleventh century, with by 1085 amunicipal charter (fuero)and a quarter inhabited by a colonyof Gascons. This was highly speculative. Lacking a documentto support his claim that Silos had a town charter in 1085,Ferotin assumed an analogy with Sahaguin, the royally favoredmonastery some forty miles southeast of the capital of Le6n.The comparison to Sahagiun is an informative one, for Sa-hagin documents the kind of evolution Schapiro claimed forSilos, but it only underscores the latter's relative lack ofdevelopment.99 In 1085 the monastery sat amid aristocraticresidences, the huts of those who worked for the monastery,and a burgus (town) formed by recent arrivals, among themCastilians. Also present was a mixed mass of Gascons, that is,French from just beyond the Pyrenees, and Burgundians,whose presence may have been linked to the fact that AlfonsoVI was married to a Burgundian, Costanza. She had built apalace and baths in Sahagiun. The Bretons, Provencales, En-glish, and Germans mentioned in the chronicle may havearrived as pilgrims who decided to stay and try their fortunein the peninsula. As for the Lombards noted there, in othersites along the pilgrimage road they served as money chang-ers. In 1093 the local market, which had been in Grajal, wasmoved to Sahagun. A chronicle enumerates ironworkers,carpenters, tailors, leather workers, shoemakers, furnituremakers, and arms makers, as well as merchants who dealt ingold, silver, and textiles from all over.For Silos we have nothing like this rich record of settle-ment and royal presence in the eleventh century. Despite theclaims of Serrano and other Castilianists, it is hard to confirmthe presence of a town around the abbey in the eleventhcentury. Beyond hypothesizing parity in 1085 with Sahagun,

Ferotin could appeal to a charter apparently authorizing asettlement around the monastery of Silos in 1075. However,Ferotin acknowledged that this date did not match the list ofwitnesses and speculatively relocated it to 1096-98 or evenlater.100 Bernard Reilly has judged this document a forg-ery.101Going by undisputed documents instead, it was only in1126, not 1085, that the king, Alfonso VII, allowed the estab-lishment of settlers around the monastery,102 and 1135 ratherthan 1085 the year that Alfonso VII conceded a fuero.103 Theneighborhood of French settlers, a sign for Schapiro, as itshould have been, of economic development, probably wasformed of people arriving in the second half of the twelfthcentury. The earliest undisputed date linked to a town wall is1179.104 Franks begin to be notable in documents only afterthe beginning of the thirteenth century.105 Reilly's estimationof the situation of Silos at the time its church was consecratedin 1088 seems a just one: "When we look at the existingrecord of all the donations we find that Silos disposed ofrelatively modest resources in 1088 by any comparative mea-surement available to us. ... The final picture remains that ofa relatively recent monastic foundation, fairly but hardlyrichly endowed with the world's goods in 1088."106

Pilgrimage was an important economic stimulus. Withoutthe arrival of new wealth, the town of Silos could not develop,no matter the holdings of the abbey itself through gifts fromnobles and kings. When Schapiro visited Silos in 1927, Lu-ciano Serrano, its abbot, had just published a sketch of themonastery, focusing on Domingo, its sainted abbot. A falling-out with the Navarrese ruler Garcia had led to Domingo'sdeparture from the monastery of San Millan de Cogolla,where he served as prior. When his talents were recognizedby Fernando I of Le6n-Castilla, Domingo took over the de-crepit monastery at Silos. After three decades he left it, at hisdeath in 1073, "one of the most visited sanctuaries, in Chris-tian Spain, virtually rivaling Santiago de Compostela."107 Amajor cult was not necessary, only a location on the road toone. Sahagun, described above, and Burgos, the major Castil-ian city north of Silos, lacked major cults but thrived, for theywere on the major road conducting pilgrims from sites be-yond the Pyrenees to the Apostle's tomb at Santiago. Serranodid not, however, mention any but Spanish pilgrims. Indeed,for a Santiago-bound pilgrim to detour to Silos would havecost three days each way, without benefit of hospices alongthe route. Schapiro repeated Serrano's claim that the posses-sion of Domingo's body brought numerous visitors and, headded, traders as well.108 Provision was made for pilgrims intwo charters. In 1067 the charter of the donation to Silos ofthe monastery of Mamblas by Sancho II cited above stipu-lated that income should be spent on candles, the hospital,and aid to pilgrims.109 In identical language, a charter ofRodrigo Diaz, the Castilian hero immortalized in the epicpoem as El Cid, made the same stipulation in 1076.110 It isnotable that the first of these provisions, in 1067, occurredbefore the heyday of Compostelan pilgrimage and before thedeath, translation, and beatification of Domingo, the as-sumed magnet for pilgrimage to Silos. Serrano dependedessentially on the Life of Domingo written by Grimaldusabout 1100.111 But a Life is bound to extol just this recogni-tion of the vitality of the cult of its subject, for it is a genre ofliterature designed to promote a cult, not to record it with


12/28


~^I_..-.-....-l^ .- _ - , i L.7...I. iZg ,f ?~ ''i1

A

B

EI

71,.i. o,,ar,p, .""?'

.. !.i ,.

'"'

'i

~,,.t,. -/, . t

i **


13/28


space. His proposal gave a sign of just how crucial secularinvolvement was for his explanation of the modern style ofthe sculpture.

Schapiro and the Beatus CommentaryIn Schapiro's claim that class conflict explained the differentstyles at Silos, a crucial role was assigned to the Beatus Com-mentary, for it alone-more precisely, its style-constitutedthe only document in the case for a reactionary mentalityon the part of the monks. Schapiro's argument depended onproblematic assumptions, some inherited, others offered onhis own. Although his recognition of the manuscript as sty-listically Mozarabic has some basis in fact, other of his char-acterizations intended to make it seem antiquated are uncon-vincing. "Is it not remarkable," Schapiro asked, "that in Silos,where the new religious order. . . was probably adopted in1081, the displaced and no longer canonical [Visigothic]writing should be employed up to 1109 in the Beatus manu-script, and that this work should be painted so sumptuouslyin the style of the Mozarabic church?"'25 With a less omni-scient scholar, one would have assumed that he accepted thealleged proscription of Visigothic script by the Council ofLe6n in 1091, but Schapiro had revealed on the previouspage that he was among the majority who rejected the histo-ricity of this council. It is puzzling, then, that he should findthe retention of so-called Visigothic script employed in themanuscript remarkable, for it was the form of writing rou-tinely used by native Le6nese and Castilian scribes until aCaroline script gradually evolved in the course of the twelfthcentury.126 The presence of another script would have sig-naled a foreign origin. When he stressed, "The content of the[Beatus] book belongs to the old national church,"127 heneglected to note that the Silos copy falls precisely in themiddle, chronologically, of the list of twenty-six known illus-trated copies of the Beatus Commentary.l28 Examples werestill being commissioned in the thirteenth century, when it isdifficult to imagine any urge to appeal to the ancient "na-tional" church. The choice of the book was not exceptionalfor an ambitious monastery. Schapiro also appealed to thefact that "It includes lengthy colophons in the spirit of theMozarabic scriptoria."l29 It does. They are word-for-word cop-ies of tenth-century colophons. As we shall see, they provideimportant clues for the neglected topic of the model for theSilos Beatus. Further, he found it significant of an unwar-ranted archaism that "It is to St. Sebastian, the older patronof the abbey, rather than to Domingo, that the book isdedicated."'30 However, such a dedication was entirely con-sistent with contemporary usage. The first charter to useDomingo instead of Sebastian as a vocable is dated 1119.'13

Schapiro also glossed over the history of the production ofthe Beatus Commentary. "The Beatus was a great enterprise,"he proclaimed. "The creation of the manuscript was a longactivity spread over a period of at least twenty years....Several colophons attest the deliberate character of theproject. The names of no less than six individuals-monksand abbots-are cited in connection with the work." Thecollection of six colophons is indeed extraordinarily rich ininformation:

7 Munnius, Acrostic, from Beatus, In Apocalipsin,Silos, 1091,MSAdd. 11695, fol. 276r (photo: by permission of The BritishLibrary)

1) This book of Revelation begins, edited by the authorsJerome, et al., to the honor of Saint Sebastian, Mary, SaintMartin and Santo Domingo Abbot (fol. 6v).

2) Explicit explanatio Danielis, 19 April 1091, 6th hour,Thursday (fols. 265v-266).

3) [Acrostic page] M[EMO]R[I]A O[B] [H]ONOREMSANCTISEBASTIANI LIBRUM ABBA FORTUNIO LIBRUM MUNNIO PRESBITERTITULABITHOC (fol. 276r, Fig. 7).

4) Dominico, and Munnio, his relative, began the workat Silos, in Abbacy of Fortunius. The Commentary on theApocalypse is finished [perfectusest] on 18 April 1091 (fol.277v).

5) This Book of Revelation is finished (fol. 278r).6) The Book was begun under Abbot Fortunius. At hisdeath only the smallest part [minima pars] was done. It wascontinued under Abbot Nunnus. Finally, under Abbot

John, Prior Petrus, relative of Abbot Nunnus, completedand entirely illuminated it [ab integro illuminabit]. It isfinished this day [1July], when Alfonso VI died. 1109 (fol.275v, by Petrus).

Schapiro essentially ignored these colophons and side-


14/28


manuscriptsonce at Silos now chiefly in the collections ofthe Bibliotheque Nationale de Francein Paris and the BritishLibrary n London as products of Silos. As we shall see, thiswas not necessarily so. That assumptionwas important to hisargument, however, for Schapiro's perception that theMozarabicstyle of the Commentaryon the Apocalypse wasanomalous depended on its being a choice etween the olderstyle and the newer, and that is made doubtful by the historyof the scriptorium.That history was only recently established in a dissertationwrittenby Ann Boylan.l33She concluded that of the survivingthirty-ninemanuscriptsfrom the Silos library,only ten couldhave been produced there, and of this ten none was olderthan the latter part of the eleventh century. Through acomparison with the products of known scriptoria,she estab-lished the likelihood that the rest had been imported fromwell-established scriptoria at Valeranica, Cardena, andCogolla,as well as unidentified sites. Some of the Silos manu-scripts are copies of the new Roman rite. The abandonmentof the traditional Mozarabic liturgy, by conciliar decree in1080 and then royal fiat, would have required new liturgicalmanuscriptsand must have been a significant factor in thedecision to install a scriptorium.l34However, the ornamentemployed in even these late-eleventh-centurycopies is in atenth-centurystyle. The only illustrated manuscript was theBeatus, completed by Petrus in 1109. This is the context ofthe undertakingof the Beatus: t was among the first projectsof a new scriptorium heavily dependent on earlier manu-scripts produced elsewhere. If the writing was accomplishedin 1091, it would have been initiated only a few years after thededication of the church of 1088 and, together with thechurch, constituted a sign that the monastery had achieved alevel of importance that could not have been claimed underDomingo. Although, as Rose Walkerdiscovered,l35the Siloscopy of the Beatus Commentarycontributed some readingsto liturgicalmanuscripts n the abbey, Beatus Commentarieswere not designed to serve the liturgy,so its commission wentbeyond necessity and may have involved a wish to have thekind of luxury manuscript found in prestigious Castilianmonasteries.Several Beatus Commentariesare linked to SanMillan de la Cogolla, the nearby monastery that was theoriginal home of Abbot Domingo.l36It could be argued that the lack of a talented hand explainsthe gap between the finished text in 1091 and the finalillustratedmanuscript in 1109. In copying the text, Domini-cus and Munnius left spaces indicated surely by theirmodel for the traditional illustrations.In the acrostic-colo-phon of folio 276r (Fig. 7), Munnius calls himself titulor, ndto him we owe that page, several small initials, and severaldisplaypages, including a cross on folio 277 (Fig. 8). This wasthe extent of the pre-Petrus llumination to 1091.137Petrus'sclaim that he did all the illumination is, then, only veryslightly exaggerated. We do not know why Munnius did notundertake the illustrations. Death intervened, perhaps. Wecan see, however, by the inferior quality of what illuminationhe did carry out, especially through a comparison of theacrosticcolophon (Fig. 7) and the cross (Fig. 8) by Munniusand the cross (Fig. 9) and acrostic (Fig. 10) by Petrus, that thedelay left us with a more splendidly illuminated manuscriptthan Munnius would have provided. Perhaps Munnius rec-

8 Munnius,Cross, romBeatus,In Apocalipsin,Silos, 1091,MSAdd. 1169S, ol. 277r (photo:by permissionof The BritishLibrary)

stepped critical issues they and the material aspects of themanuscript raise. What kind of copy of the Commentaryonthe Apocalypse served as the model? Why did it take so longto complete?If the two stages enumerated in the colophons, completionof the text in 1091 by Munnius and Dominicus and its illu-mination in 1109 by Petrus, are taken as a single campaign,they indicate an interval of time more commensurate witherecting a building than with the production of a manuscriptof whatever degree of luxury. In characterizing he campaignas "deliberate,"Schapiro implied that it was more or lesscontinuous and lengthy because of the seriousness of theundertaking. But a fully illustrated Beatus Commentary ofthe same family could be completed in three months by onescribe.l32 n fact, the collation of the colophonic informationand the actual manuscriptconfirms that the Silos Beatus wasproduced in two different campaigns separated by eighteenyears. Schapiro also took for granted, with others, that thescriptorium of Silos at the time it produced the Beatus Com-mentary had a long history. This assumption stemmed fromthe acceptance of all of the tenth- and eleventh-century


15/28


9 Petrus,Cross, rom Beatus,In Apocalipsin,Silos, 1091,MSAdd. 11695,fol. 5v (photo: by permissionof The BritishLibrary)

ognized the task was beyond him. Writing is one thing,paintingsome one hundred illustratedand illuminatedpagesanother. Still, Schapiro's question, "How shall we explainthen the belated survivalof the older Mozarabicart in Silostoward 1100, twenty years after the fundamental religiouschange, at a time when the Romanesque style was alreadypracticed in the abbey?"rightly highlights an unexpectedlystrong imprint of a styleborn a century and a half earlier andabandoned at the time Petrus completed the Commen-tary.l38

Two features contribute most to the apparent Mozarabicpersonality of the Silos Commentary: the brilliant poly-chromy assembled in a kind of intarsia of small panels ofintense hues, and the format of enframed illustrations withbanded backgroundsthat render the scenes spaceless in theillusionistic sense (Fig. 1). These elements, the hallmark ofthe tenth-centurystyle,allow it to be identified as Mozarabic.Schapiro saw the style as a case of revival,not survival,anddeemed it the result of the fundamental changes affectingnorthern Spain as the rulers of Leon-Castile pursued a pro-gramof modernization:"Thefact is, that the greatchanges inSpanish society during the eleventh century, which till re-cently provokedhistoricalcontroversyover their value, theirpromotion or destruction of a Spanish national spirit, were

10 Petrus,Acrostic, rom Beatus,In Apocalipsin,ilos, 1091,MSAdd. 11695,fol. 6r (photo: by permissionof The BritishLibrary)

not accepted in their time byall classes of societyin auniformway, but led to real conflicts of interest.''139He consideredthe change of liturgy a particularly ensitive point for monks.Although he admitted that Silos probably helped promotethe change of rite,140 e went on to stressthat the content ofthe book "belongsto the old national church,"and that"Theproduction of this copy affirms an independent, thoughweakened, monastic tradition.''14lFinally, "The Mozarabicwork is a book, a product of the monastic scriptorium, anintimate workdestined for the libraryand the readingsat theservices. It is traditionaland native, referring to a model ofthe eighth century created in a primitive, medieval, con-quered Spain and rarelycopied beyond its borders. Its con-tent is Apocalyptic, fantastic, and exegetical, and the paint-ings are conceived ascolorful but staticemblems.''142With noevidence beyond his reading of the style itself, Schapiroattributed the preponderant Mozarabic personality of theSilos Beatus to a desire to invoke a disappearing Hispanicculture.An alternativeexplanation must be explored, namely, theinfluence of the model on the Beatus Commentary'sstyle. Itis certain that its iconography depended on the model, forwith the exception of additions to the orthodox complementof miniatures,usuallymarginalfigures, it is undeviating from


16/28


11 Florentius, Cross, from Smaragdushomiliarum,Valerancia,10th century. Cathedral of C6rdoba, MS1, fol. 2v (photo:author)

the standard set of illustrations in the other four members ofits family tree. His reference to "a model of the eighthcentury" invoked the original Commentary on the Apoca-lypse assembled by Beatus at Liebana about 775, but the issueof the direct model employed in the Silos scriptorium wentunexamined. In fact, there are substantial clues to the mod-el's origin and, therefore, its appearance. The texts of thecolophons point directly to the Castilian scriptorium of Va-leranica and the manuscripts of Florentius, its presiding ge-nius in the tenth century.143 Florentius introduced the kindof acrostic we see on folio 276 recto (Fig. 7) in 945 in hisMoralia in Iob.144Munnius's long, poetic lament on folio 278recto over the physical torture imposed by scribal labor cou-pled with a plea for a gentle handling of the manuscript isfound, word for word, in two of the manuscripts written inthe middle of the tenth century at Valeranica by Florentius,his Moralia in lob of 945145 and his Smaragdus homiliarium(now in C6rdoba).146 The cross of this Smaragdus (Fig. 11)resembles that inserted by Munnius in the Silos Beatus onfolio 277 recto (Fig. 8). The likeness extends to the sameacclamation-PAX LUX LEX REx-and the unusual split pal-mette filler in the openings of the omega, a motif magnifiedin the omega of Florentius and Sanctius's Bible of 960 (nowin San Isidoro de Le6n).147 Petrus's ornament of the finalcampaign of 1109 drew on more recent, Gallic, prototypes,but Valeranica's influence was still present. The words of his

colophon on folio 6 verso also duplicate, with the exceptionof its description of the text it accompanies, those of acolophon in the Smaragdus by Florentius.l48 But the mostsignificant evidence that Valeranican illustration was knownby Petrus is given by one of his full-page pictures, the Christin Majesty with the symbols of the Evangelists on folio 7 verso(Fig. 12). This familiar subject is foreign to the Beatus tradi-tion, for in the Beatus text the appropriate Apocalyptic pas-sage separated the vision of the beasts from that of theenthroned Christ. Although his figure of Christ has beenenthroned and robed in a manner that conforms better withRomanesque interpretations of the theme, Petrus's Majestypage reveals similarities with that serving as a frontispiece forthe Bible carried out by Florentius and Sanctius at Valeranicain 960 (Fig. 13).149 The figures are organized by the samequincunx pattern of medallions.The numerous links between the products of the Valerani-can scriptorium and the library and scriptorial style of Silosoffer clear indications that the model for the Silos Beatusoriginated in that Castilian monastery.150Valeranica's historyhas heretofore been associated with the production of Bibles,but the clues provided by the Silos Beatus almost certainlymean that Florentius also carried out a Beatus Commentary.On the other hand, we know the Valeranican style from thedozens of illustrations in the Bible of 960 now in San Isidorode Le6n: their settings do not give the illusion of pictorialspace and are inhabited by flat and linearly designed poly-chromatic figures (Fig. 14).151Any Commentary on the Apoc-alypse carried out at Valeranica in the tenth century wouldhave incorporated these properties within the Beatus formatof framed miniatures and banded backgrounds.The Mozarabic role Schapiro assigned the Silos Beatusseems to have dimmed his normally acute reading of style. Henoted figures that displayed a Romanesque style, notably inthe Hell page (Fig. 20) and the jongleurs (Fig. 4), but the factis that the vast majority of the figures of the Commentary areinformed by proto-Romanesque conventions alien to trueMozarabic manuscripts, even as they inhabit Mozarabic set-tings. When comparable angels are viewed, one from Silos(Fig. 15) and one from the mid-tenth-century Morgan Beatus(Fig. 16), the post-Mozarabic character even of the tradi-tional pictures is evident.152 In the drapery of the angel of thetenth-century manuscript any illusion of mass is suppressed,whereas the figure style of the Silos Beatus reveals a concernwith plasticity, if in an inchoate way. The attempt to suggesta modeled surface involves a kind of shadow pocket createdby hatching behind a curved line. The formula is alreadypresent in the design of the robe of the standing Christ of thealpha (fol. 6r) and the Angels with the Gospels of the BeatusCommentary carried out for Fernando and Sancha, rulers ofLe6n, in 1047.153 Even though the figures of the Silos Beatusremain virtually as flat on the page as actual Mozarabicfigures, the Commentary's appearance is progressive. As wehave seen, the Silos scriptorium was able to take on illustratedmanuscripts only with the presence, some eighteen yearsafter the writing had been completed, of Petrus, the abbot'skinsman, a local product, and not, presumably, a graduate ofa professional scriptorium. He was the best they had. Thekind of sensitivity to style and the possibility of choice calledfor by Schapiro's theory are unrealistic.


17/28


12 Christ in Majesty,from Beatus, InApocalipsin,Silos, 1091, MSAdd. 11695,fol. 7v (photo: by permission of TheBritish Library)

The gap between the tentative Romanesque advances ofthe Silos scriptorium and the progressive strides made atother monastic sites better endowed and supported may bemeasured by a comparison with a Beatus Commentary com-pleted at the same time in the monastery of San Millan de laCogolla, only some fifty miles north of Silos.154 Here there isno doubting the presence of two attributes often claimed, ifunrealistically, for Silos in the eleventh century: a thrivinglocal cult, centered in this case on Saint Emilian, and royalfavor.155 The contexts are similar. The San Millan Commen-tary was begun and partly illustrated at the end of the tenthcentury. At about the time Petrus undertook his comparabletask at Silos, it was completed by someone capable of employ-ing an up-to-date Byzantinizing Frankish style (Fig. 17).156Ironically, in view of Schapiro's thesis, there is a documented

record at San Millan of a protest against the adoption of theRoman rite, the kind of reactionary attitude that Schapiro'sthesis assumed for Silos.157A comparison with the monastery of Sahagin, whose pre-cocious development is described above, is also instructive.The copy of the Beatus Commentary carried out there in1086 (now in Burgo de Osma), more than two decadesbefore Petrus accepted the task of illuminating the Silos

Beatus, displays a much more advanced Romanesque style(Fig. 18).158 The writing, of course, like that of the SilosBeatus, is in so-called Visigothic script.The contrast between the styles of these centers and that ofSilos suggests that at least part of the explanation for theMozarabism of the Silos Beatus may be attributed to the pro-vincial nature of Silos at the turn of the century. Only the


18/28


13 Florentius and Sanctius, Christ in Majesty,from Bible,Valeranica, 960. Le6n, R. C. de San Isidoro, MS2, fol. 2r(photo: Institut Amatller)

fortuitous presence of a talented native son made it possiblefinally for the abbey to add illustrations to its ambitious butunfinished copy of Beatus's Commentary on the Apocalypse,albeit in a compromised way when measured against theimported artistic language at better-established sites. Such anexplanation was unthinkable so long as Castile and Silos wereimagined to be at the very forefront of the progressive trendsof a new Spain, favored by the Le6nese rulers and exposed toultra-Pyrenean currents fostered by the pilgrimage to San-tiago-that is, the profile of Silos advanced by the Castilian-ists and accepted by Schapiro. The evidence counts againstsuch an exalted position for Silos. The level of Munnius'sillumination indicates that not only the illustration of booksbut mere ornament as well had never reached a distinguishedlevel in the eleventh century. Within this context, Petrus'smore than adequate rise to the challenge of completing theBeatus Commentary deserves still more honor.There is, in fact, a feature of the Silos Beatus that makes abetter case for nostalgia than Schapiro's revival of an archaicstyle. Opening the Commentary, one discovers a first gather-ing of four leaves that originally belonged to a different,older, manuscript. Schapiro was silent about these, but asDom Louis Brou pointed out, they are leaves from an An-tiphonary of the Hispanic rite carried out a century earlier.159

It had been made obsolete by the rejection, about 1080, ofthe Visigothic liturgy. We do not know precisely when theseleaves joined the Commentary, but as we shall see, the as-sumption that they were appended early in the twelfth cen-tury is reasonable. This antiphonary had been a major book,and its commemoration was guaranteed with the attachmentof its illuminated pages, including two cross frontispieces(fols. 2v, 3v) and a Vespertinum monogram (Fig. 19), to theBeatus Commentary, considered a precious artifact. This wasa far more certain way of paying homage to the past than theemployment of a style that had to be recognized as archaic.

Schapiro's display of learning was at its most brilliant in thepages he devoted to the illumination of Hell that was addedto the formerly blank folio 2 recto of this initial gathering.The Hell frontispiece (Fig. 20) is the most Romanesque ofthe Beatus's images and unique to this copy.160 Its theme isthe punishment of Lust (a couple in bed) and Greed (Diveswith his moneybags). Why this popular Romanesque iconog-raphy was chosen for this setting is not clear.161 It was as-sumed by Schapiro and virtually all other commentators,myself included, that the Hell page was executed by Petrus.However, none of the formulas employed by that painter forthe eye, nose, feet, hands, or drapery shows up elsewhere inthe Commentary. On the other hand, it made no use ofshadow pockets, that most widespread convention of theinterior of the Commentary. Nor is the cross-legged postureof Michael, a motif popular in Languedocian art, foundanywhere within the Commentary. It appears, however, morethan once in the cloister, and it seems likely that the designerof the relief Christ and His DisciplesJourney to Emmaus (Fig.21) was asked by AbbotJohannes to design a frontispiece forthe Commentary.162 This suggests that the older Antiphonarypages were already bound in, thus providing a convenient sitefor this addition on one of the blank versos. That gatheringcombined, then, homage to the past and a claim for moder-nity, as if in vindication of Schapiro's conclusion, if not of hisargument.

Schapiro's attempt to make the apparent Mozarabism ofthe style of the Commentary's illustrations a deliberate revivalof an earlier style in order to evoke an eclipsed and lamentednational culture is vulnerable on several counts. The actualstyle departs from the Mozarabic style of the tenth century inessential respects. His thesis presupposes a scriptorium withexperienced illustrators who offered a choice between a trulycontemporary style and the one actually employed. As wehave seen, this was not the case. The Beatus was the first andonly illustrated manuscript made at Silos, and it had to waiteighteen years before anyone could undertake the illustra-tions. That person was a relative of the abbot. Given therelatively unsophisticated manner of the figures' design-ajudgment corroborated by comparisons with earlier exam-ples of a truly Romanesque style in such undeniably impor-tant monasteries as San Millan de la Cogolla and Saha-gun-the retention of Mozarabic features must have owedmuch to the model used. That model, almost certainly, was atenth-century manuscript from Valeranica with a representa-tive Mozarabic style. Finally, the proposition that style couldserve as an ideological banner is debatable and would requirean argument that Schapiro does not provide. The sensitivity


19/28


14 Florentiusand Sanctius, sraelitesDepartingEgypt, rom Bible,Valeranica, 60. Leon, R. C. de SanIsidoro,MS 2, fol. 38r (photo:InstitutAmatller)

of these styles was predominant.''l64 n contrast to the ency-clopedic disquisitionon the vices of the Hell page (Fig. 20) in"FromMozarabic o Romanesque in Silos" six pages of textand thirteen pages of notes the dissertation presentedmerely this observationon the image:

There is one interesting evidence that in the Beatus amodel has been mis-copied. St. Michael stands at theentrance to Hell in which are represented two figures, ofman and woman, in bed and a figure of a miser with agreatpurse,who is being tormented by toads and serpents.The latter is the punishment of Unchastity,and is misap-plied to the miser.l65

to stylisticcategorieshis argumentpresumesseems essentiallymodern.Inventinga MarxistArt HistoryWhen Schapiro first commented on the distinctive stylesassociatedwith Silos he had seen no need to add to the briefobservation,"The Silos reliefs are intrusive in Castille [sic].The manuscriptpaintings executed in the monasteryat thevery same time the sculptures were carved, are thoroughlyMozarab n style, and in no way resemble the latter.''l63Tenyearslater, in "FromMozarabic o Romanesquein Silos,"thenotion that one of the styles s there because it is local and theother because it is imported was expressly rejected: "Nor isthe coincidence [of an older and a newer] style [at Silos] dueto a chance survivalof random worksfrom a time when one The verycontrastbetweenthe dissertation nd the article,


20/28


15 The Angel Hurls a Millstone intothe Sea, from Beatus, In Apocalipsin,Silos, 1109, MsAdd. 11695, fol. 193r(photo: by permission of The BritishLibrary)

and the very small, indeed minuscule, degree to which itprovides a foundation for the 1939 article, make even moreremarkable the conceptual revolution the latter displays, themore so with the recognition that its composition took placeat a time that offered, as he said, significant distractions.These distractions, provided by the debate in the 1930s overart's role in the cause of revolution, were, of course, theinspiration for the new interpretation of diverse styles at Silos.Differences that Schapiro reasonably explained the first timearound as the consequence of local talents working in thescriptorium while visiting carvers applied their expertise in adifferent medium in the construction of a new cloister wereconverted, in his determination to fashion a new, Marxist, arthistory, into a signal of social conflict between an otherwiseundocumented conservative clique among the monks andnew emancipating, secularizing currents. As we have seen,this class-based explanation involves distortions that under-mine the history that he proposed. No doubt, the impositionof his theoretical model on the site had the virtue of forcingus to consider in a new way the role of the social infrastruc-ture. At the same time, however, his reconstruction showedremarkably little interest in history at the microlevel. Forexample, Schapiro never addressed the issue of patronageposed by the fact that the Beatus Commentary and the clois-ter were designed for the same monastic community at theorder of the same abbot. Nor that of the inherent conflictbetween his theory and the fact that Silos, as he admitted,seemed to favor the change of rite. Indeed, the scriptoriumthat produced what he argued was an ultraconservative copyof the Beatus seems to have come into being to provide thetexts required by the new rite.

Schapiro applied his theory of Romanesque style as a re-flection of secularization to a second article published in

1939, "The Sculptures of Souillac."166Here again it is claimedthat the art reflects society, but the formal qualities of the artso monopolize the writer's attention that the society thatproduced it is inadequately appreciated, if not overlooked.Schapiro again advanced the idea that Romanesque stylereflected the values of a secularizing culture. In the greatreliefs of Silos, these had been expressed in the "naturalismand monumentality made possible by the material advancesof the time."'67 At Souillac "more naturalistic forms" are alsoemployed. But an aggressive secularization of the art of Souil-lac was chiefly registered compositionally in the large reliefdevoted to the story of the fall and redemption of Theophi-lus. In this work, Schapiro concluded that the central place-ment in the composition of the secular functionary / apos-tate cleric Theophilus, with a smaller Virgin Mary occupyinga location above him, marked a "devaluation of absolutetranscendence."168

However, the subversion implied by such a displacementreally depends on the original function of the relief. Al-though today it is situated on the interior side of the doorwayopening on the aisle of the church in the manner of atympanum, it was designed for some other, debated, location.Schapiro identified it vaguely as "a fragment of a largerwhole," sharing doubts with others that it originated as atympanum. Still, his argument depended on assumptionsabout composition valid only for tympana, and he elected thehierarchically ordered tympana of Moissac and Chartresfor comparison. More persuasive as counterparts for theTheophilus relief are the biblical narratives installed on thelateral walls of the porches of Moissac and Beaulieu.169 In arelief of this type there was a logic in centering the Theophi-lus story on Theophilus, the protagonist of the hagiographic


21/28


16 The Angel with the Scorching Sun,from Beatus, In Apocalipsin,Tabara,mid-lOth century. New York, PierpontMorgan LibraryM644, fol. 189r(photo: by Permission of the PierpontMorgan Library)

narrative, even though it was, of course, the Virgin whoperformed the redemptive miracle.In the end, Schapiro's obsessive focus on compositionmasked what was truly audacious, namely, the dedication of amajor example of the recently revived medium of sculptureto a hagiographic-not biblical-narrative in order to fostera Marian cult at a site that had little otherwise with which topromote one. Presumptions about an increasingly secularistculture deflected attention from the advancement of a reli-gious agenda. Even the exceptional presence of ajamb statueof Saint Joseph failed to elicit a comment. Schapiro laterdevoted a masterful study to Joseph,170 but as with theTheophilus relief, recognition of iconographic innovationwas sacrificed at Souillac to his formalist preoccupations.Although the new kind of art history had as its goal a betterunderstanding of the relationship between art and society,the practical issues of patronage and function were ignored,as they had been at Silos. The relief is analyzed so exclusivelyfrom the standpoint of composition that the reader receives

the impression that its designer enjoyed the freedom ofan avant-garde artist of Schapiro's own time. "The special-ized autonomy of the sculptor as an artisan" is taken forgranted.'17 For Schapiro this was key to the subversive con-tent he perceived in Romanesque art around 1100. Thenecessity imposed by a Marxist framework to align progresswith the secular led to seriously flawed reconstructions atboth sites.

The perception that Schapiro's focus on form marginal-ized meaning and content may err in assuming a traditionalunderstanding of content as something allied to subject.Schapiro's essays on the nature of what constituted revolu-tionary art involved formally generated content divorcedfrom representation. In his review of Portrait of Mexico byDiego de Rivera and Bertram D. Wolf in the Marxist Quarterlyin 1937 Schapiro argued that style itself may communicaterevolutionary substance even if the subject does not: "workswithout political intention have by their honesty and vigorexcited men to serious questioning of themselves and their


22/28


18Thengel Hurlsa Millstone nto the Sea,from Beatus,Inpocalipsin,Sahagun,1086.Cathedralof Burgode Osma,od.,ol. 149r (photo:InstitutAmatller)

Marxistrt history involves the fact that with no help fromocumentaryevidence, it is difficultto assumesocial conflictsithinhesingularlycohesive group. Monkswere committedyvowo share the same life under a single authoritativeeadhatcommissioned both worksof art at Silos, and theyonstitutedhe exclusive audience. At Silos Schapiro facedhataye termed for sake of argument a "conflict"oftyles. Itasooted in different modes of production involv-ng onhe ne hand provincial scribes and on the othernvitedprofessionalartisans. This situation might offer aotentialplatform for a Marxist approach. However, theocialconflictdemanded by his revolutionarymode of Marx-stmethodologyad to be invented.Aquarterf a century after writing

Art Bulletin Schapiro in Silos

Documents

Transcript of Art Bulletin Schapiro in Silos